What does an SEO copywriter do?

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Just a few years ago, SEO copywriters were associated with writing simple, seemingly undemanding texts "for search engines". SEO copywriters were people who created, among other things, pretzels (texts saturated with keywords, which are insignificant from today's perspective), synonymous content (i.e. writing the same thing, but differently) or descriptions for once popular catalogues. Such work was largely repetitive. Imagine that you had to write 100 pretzels (and that was the case) with 1000 characters for the phrase "women's watches" for publication on presell pages. The text did not have to be outstanding. It could be "more or less" put together, in accordance with the rules of the Polish language and have the required keywords. On the one hand, writing pretzels resembled working on a conveyor belt, but on the other hand it required a lot of creativity. Many SEO copywriters who now create much more sophisticated texts started out writing pretzels.

Today, precles and catalogs are a thing of the past. They play a smaller and smaller role in ranking a website. Nobody bothers with them anymore and nobody orders precles to be written. Well, unless it's for a very, very deep background.

So, if precles are becoming a thing of the past, what does an SEO copywriter do now?

Does an SEO copywriter do the same thing as an SEO specialist?
Of course not.
Nevertheless, it sometimes happens that people come to me who want to position their website.

The work of an SEO copywriter is similar to that of an SEO specialist in some ways, but they are not the same. An SEO copywriter typically creates original content to support the SEO specialist's strategy.
In other words, the work of an SEO copywriter is one of the components of the work of an SEO specialist. Good content helps in positioning the site, but it is one of the elements. An SEO copywriter usually works on behalf of an SEO specialist. Never the other way around.

SEO Copywriter Workshop - What Does It Really Do?
At the beginning of this article I wrote about texts written "for search engines" - pretzels, synonymous texts, etc. The only recipient "consumer" of this content was the search engine, the user did not count. Today we live on the other side of the mirror. Google algorithms are cunning. They no longer fall for such tricks. They only promote what is valuable, what is useful to people using the search engine. For this reason, SEO copywriters, when creating texts, first think about making them valuable and useful to the user.
Searching for keywords — phase one.
The first stage of creating a new text is to discover the intentions of Internet users , which usually take the form of a set of the most frequently searched topics. A package of issues in the form of phrases and keywords is usually received by an SEO specialist. If he works on his own and, for example, edits a blog for an online store, he creates such a list of keywords himself. He sits down in front of the computer with a coffee in his hand and before he starts writing anything, he fires up Google Search Console, SEMSTORM, SENUTO, Ubersuggest or Answer the Public and discovers the intentions of the target reader of the text.
Let me explain this with an example.

Let's imagine that an SEO copywriter has been commissioned to run a blog for an online store with wedding decorations. The main goal of this blog (as in most cases) is to drive organic traffic and support positioning. To achieve this goal, SEO copy must find out what search engine questions are most often asked in the context of the topic of "wedding decorations". The more architect mailing list queries, the greater the popularity of the phrase and thus the interest in the topic.


Graph with results of internet users' queries from answerthepublic.com


Internet users' query phrases from ubersuggest.com

Since this is the beginning of a company blog, the copy sits down at the tools and throws in the most general phrase "wedding decorations".

In this case, the copywriter used the free Answerthepublic.com , which threw out answers in the form of a beautiful graph with many questions from Internet users. The graphic includes the phrase "wedding car decoration". This phrase interested about 320 users in a given month (which he learned from Ubersuggest.com). He decided that this was a good topic for the first blog post, especially since the client's store has a lot of car decorations that can be linked to.
Notice that the SEO copywriter decided to write a text resulting from the needs of a certain group of users (estimated 320 searching in a given month). He writes for them about what they want to read and what they were looking for. He doesn't come up with topics out of thin air. He doesn't wonder whether a given issue interests anyone. The SEO copywriter is guided by data and knows to whom and about what to write.

Does that make sense? Absolutely.

Text creation and optimization – phase two.
If an SEO copywriter knows what to write about, there is nothing left for him to do but simply create a text in accordance with the guidelines. Success will only be achieved if the text about car decorations is written solidly and substantively. Only such a blog article will be read with interest by the Internet user and will satisfy the user. In this case, it is a system of communicating vessels. Search engine algorithms are very sensitive to poor quality content. When the search engine realizes that readers are not reading the text (e.g. they quickly leave the page), it will start to lower the article's position. A good SEO copywriter knows this. An SEO-conscious copywriter will not write a text that is weak in terms of content, because it does not pay off at all. Articles must be a source of satisfaction for readers - something that educates, entertains or enlightens them. Only writing such content makes sense these days.

Strong substantive content is one side of the coin, the other is its proper SEO optimization. Why is it needed? Google must have content written in a specific way to understand what the page is about. This is where what ordinary copy does not know begins, but what SEO copy specializes in, i.e. OPTIMIZATION.

Text optimization is the preparation of an article in such a way that the Google robot can better familiarize itself with the content of a given text, extract the main subject matter from it, and assign the content to specific keywords. The better the text is optimized, the greater the chance that it will be higher in search rankings (of course, provided that it is interesting, substantive, etc.). Content optimization begins at the text planning stage (e.g. determining the thematic content of paragraphs, heading titles), the rest is "added" after it is finished.

SEO copywriter when creating an article:
knows what the keyword density in the text should be;
knows how long the article title should be to be displayed in its entirety in the SERPs;
knows what the structure of headings should look like (H1, H2, H3, etc.) and what should be included in them;
knows how to format content so that Internet users read it with pleasure (see: How do your customers read your website?
knows how to saturate text with partial-match anchor;
knows what the ALT tag is for and can create good descriptions for graphics;
knows the rules of internal linking and can use it, for example, when running a company blog;
he can write above the fold text on mobile, because for him it's everyday life;
And he knows many other things that are irrelevant to the average Internet user.

In short - his on-site activities are handled to perfection.

If the text is written well and properly optimized, there is a good chance that it will be indexed high. People who are looking for "car decorations" will click on the article link, read it and thanks to that they will go to the client's store. In this way, good content will drive organic traffic. The position of the store with the blog, where such a valuable article is located, will also rise. As you can see, one text can do a lot.

An SEO copywriter realizes that these details will help the text he writes rank better. These are the things that distinguish a copywriter from an SEO copywriter. The latter has come a long way from writing pretzels to creating and optimizing high-quality topic articles, right?

And besides that...
Of course, writing good blog texts or thematic articles is just the tip of the iceberg. A modern SEO copywriter still writes less complicated content. These include background texts for the so-called SEO backend. Often, an SEO copywriter also creates product and category descriptions for online stores . In practice, any text that aims to support the natural ranking of a website or e-store in a search engine should be written by an SEO copywriter. Only a text written by a person who knows what they're doing will give results.